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Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences pp 1–7Cite as

Aesthetics

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Definition/Introduction

The early modern period witnessed a transition between two different theoretical discourses regarding artistic practice: From the theory of art to aesthetics. This transition is described in the entry below. In the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventieth centuries, theory of art existed in the form of practical manuals for practitioners of the various arts (as architecture, design, drawing, sculpture, machinery, engineering, music, literature, and rhetoric). Over the eighteenth century, for the first time, one finds the development of what one still calls “aesthetics,” that is to say an encompassing philosophy of art which is based on the sensual reception of the arts. This new phase was energized by the development art criticism and evaluation of art (see below). The corpus of early modern theory of art is a relatively cohesive group of writings, returning to regular, repeating concepts and stylistic standards. In this sense, theory of art can be viewed as...

Related Topics

  • Abstraction
  • Beauty
  • Color
  • Composition
  • Decorum
  • Eloquence
  • Figure
  • Genius
  • Geometry
  • Harmony
  • Idea
  • Imagination
  • Neo-Platonism
  • Perspective
  • Proportion
  • Technique
  • Vraisemblance
  • Ut pictura poiesis
  • Visual epistemology

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tel Aviv, Department of Art History, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and the Beit Berl College of Art, Kfar-Sava, Israel

    Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

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  1. Adi Efal-Lautenschläger
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Prof. Dr. Dana Jalobeanu

  2. Département de philosophie, University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France

    Charles T. Wolfe

Section Editor information

  1. ICUB-Humanities, Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  2. Philosophy, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France

    Charles T. Wolfe

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Efal-Lautenschläger, A. (2022). Aesthetics. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_598-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_598-1

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